Sherry Turkle Quotes

Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.

We expect more from technology and less from each other. We create technology to provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

What is so seductive about texting, about keeping that phone on, about that little red light on the BlackBerry, is you want to know who wants you.

The feeling that 'no one is listening to me' make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.

What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.

People are lonely. The network is seductive. But if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. We sacrifice conversation for mere connection.

Everyone is always having their attention divided between the world of the people [they're] with and this other reality.

Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.

Computers are not good or bad; they are powerful.

We expect more from technology and less from each other.

we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.

Loneliness is failed solitude.

We're too busy communicating to think, too busy communicating to connect, and sometimes we're too busy communicating to create. This is true for individuals and also true for organizations.

Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation.

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy.

We're smitten with technology. And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance. But it's time to talk.

We... heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.

Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are.

Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?

If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.

I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.

These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.

I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport.

We're letting [technology] take us places that we don't want to go.

Hold on to your passion - you'll need it!

As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.

We are not as strong as technology's pull.

The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.

We used to think, 'I have a feeling; I want to make a call.' Now our impulse is, 'I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.'

If we don't teach kids how to be alone, they will end up only lonely.

Teenagers would rather text than talk. They feel calls would reveal too much.

Robots want to love us because the field of artificial intelligence has programmed robots to say they want to love us.

We all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits.

Everything that enchants may be said to deceive.

It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us.

What is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to a shared store of human meaning?

Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.

In the area of robotics and in the area of connectivity, technology is offering us things that we are vulnerable to - and we have to have a better response than a shrug.

The computer is a mind machine. It doesn't have its own psychology, but in a way it presents itself as though it does.

We don't need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place.

Online life is about premeditation.

He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.

He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.

But, of course, what is up on Facebook is her edited life.

Connectivity becomes a craving.

Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.